In the heavy blue she moved. The cacophonous red pacing of her unholy heart thrashed against the silence that held a finger to her lips, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, over and over again in the heartbreaking hum of a collision that unfolded before her eyes a thousand times and back again. Where did her mind end and the blood begin? What, in this chaos - in this solitude, had she become? It was a question she could not face for fear of the answers that lay in its wake. The glasshewn threads holding her together glinted in the moonlight, revealing a skeleton filled with a cyclonic emptiness that rattled between the hollow of her bones, left alone to scream into the night without a soul to hear its plight. For was not that the nature of grief? To drain the very light from one's life and leave them with only the husk of their flesh and skin, damned to wander this dark barren earth with only their perforated honeycomb memories.
The mountain had been calling her name. Rhoswen, it whispered at the birth of every new moon, Rhoswen, it hummed in the floodlight of the sun. At first it had been easy to ignore: it had been nothing but an itch at the back of her neck. But slowly it had grown into a plague that set her body aflame. And for the first time in a long time the woman felt something beyond the eternal grey torpor that had woven its way into her very essence. What that feeling was she could not, would not, name. And from the shadows she had come; patiently, obediently. The violet blush of a new dawn had begun to bloom by the time she reached Veneror's foothills, and the kaleidoscopic light fractured in such a way behind the mountain's crest that it almost broke her heart to gaze upon it.
"I am here. I have come."
11-08-2018, 04:57 PM
Played by
Jeanne [PM] Posts: 399 — Threads: 81 Signos: 100
Seraphina is not in the business of chasing after ghosts.
She tried to, once. She tried to cling to her past – to what she thought she was, or what she thought that she needed to be – when it seemed that everything around her was spiraling out of her control, but she had drained through her own grasp like water out of a cup with a hole in it. She’d learned, very slowly and very unhappily, that she couldn’t remain stagnant in the face of a world that changed as quickly and viciously as the desert wind; she had learned that the only way to live was to find some way to change, to press forward regardless. Ghosts. Little fragments; sometimes she still looks into a darkened hallway and sees Viceroy’s luminescent golden eyes peering back, twin lanterns in the shadows.
She hadn’t intended to return to Veneror, but she slips out of the bitter chill of Solterra in the darkest depths of a cloudless night, her charcoal lips pulled into a worried frown. (Would they find a way to end the strange, relentless winter that had swallowed her desert homeland like a voracious snake? It was hard to know – but the gods might, and if they would not come to her, she would go to them.) She ascends the mountaintop just as dawn, a dusky swath of violet paling to blush at its tips, begins to break the horizon. She moves quickly and mechanically, exertion breaking a cold sweat over her brow; her breath clouds in the cool of early spring as she climbs higher and higher, to where the statues of the gods were what felt like so long ago.
And, as she reaches the peak, her gaze catches on another figure.
She sees a lost woman, the red twines of her hair like fire in the pale blush of the dawn. She sees a woman who lost her brother to the night he served, a woman who lost her lover to flame, a woman who’d been homeless – torn between smoke and stars and sun and scald – for far too long. Rhoswen. There was something frantic and tragic and horribly, horribly lonely about her silhouette, a paleness cast dark against the rising sun. Seraphina takes one step towards her, tentatively, then another and another; she almost calls out to her. Where have you been where have you been where have you been. She hasn’t seen her since the gods returned; she hasn’t seen her since the Denoctian regime disappeared; she hasn’t seen her since her kingdom froze over. A part of her wondered if she, like her brother, was lost to the void.
But there she stands – solid as polished sandstone but hazy and flickering in the dusty light. I am here. I have come.
She bridges the distance between them slowly, and she does not speak until she stands at her side. “Rhoswen…” She trails off. How many times has the red woman found her, torn asunder, a girl carved in the shape of a banshee’s wail? And now it is she that looks at her with a dreadful sort of quiet, the bright chips of her eyes gleaming in the haze of early dawn. “What are you seeking, Rhoswen?” What do you hope to find here, on this holy mountain abandoned by its gods?
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have
Rhoswen could not remember all the ways she had felt pain in the short sharp chapters of a book (her book) still unwritten, but she knew - regardless - that it had been interminable. The memory of each stroke borne from the fibres of a hallowed-gold bullwhip lashing across her spine lived on in the hellish, hazardous realms of her mind. A divine castigation for all the crimes she had committed across chambered timelines and many amaranthine lives. Hell was not a threat Rhoswen feared, for there was no torment she had not already endured; be it at the hands of those she loved or the very moon under which her fate had been sealed. She had lost everything to that opaque lunar light: her brother, her daughter, her lover, her sanity. And what, then, was left? Like a wolf drawn to a sky-reaching bluff under the cover of darkness, Rhos had found herself almost entirely alone - almost. For no matter how hard she yearned for the sun's terrible grip, the red woman could not evade that gentle maternal embrace of the moon.
What did it feel like to harbour a rift within every tooth, filament and grain of your soul? Rhoswen knew, oh she knew.
"Rhoswen -"
There was nothing that could startle the she-wolf now, but even as she stood on the very edge of oblivion Rhos knew she had not expected to share the dawn with the queen of old and new. Had she even expected to lay eyes on Seraphina again in this life? It was not a question she wished to answer. Dilated cosmic eyes sifted through the mist in search of the voice and it's mistress, succeeding with unsurprising efficiency. The Solterran Queen was both unrecognisable and unchanged. To Rhoswen, she was a tapestry. A monochrome canvas painted by callous fingers - hands owned by a general and a devil - and swathed in humble glory. The truth was that Rhoswen could not satisfy the pride she harboured for this woman she barely knew; it sickened and soothed her. The weight of her guilt felt somehow lighter under the sovereign's gaze, but the paradox of this truth brought only further anarchy to her blood and her bones.
"A long time ago, I thought I knew." She breathed, tongue rasping over the dry walls of her mouth. Rhoswen felt as though her hooves had sewn themselves into the very earth below, amalgamating with the clay and the rock and the roots of this cursed kingdom. "But I am not that woman anymore. Now, I am no-one and so I have nothing to seek." The silence that followed was bloodless and haunted by the gilded, fractured light that had risen up around their silhouettes. And then -
"Seraphina, I don't want you to ever forgive me."
ooc -- two months later i'm so sorry, final year is kicking my butt @Seraphina
01-22-2019, 04:09 PM
Played by
Jeanne [PM] Posts: 399 — Threads: 81 Signos: 100
“A long time ago, I thought I knew.”
And wasn’t that line bitterly familiar? The silver queen remembers when she took her crown; so many of her memories were fuzzy, discolored by trauma and disbelief, but that one remains vivid, the way the light refracted through the stained-glass windows that would be shattered beyond repair when the Davke attacked only months later…
She thought that she could do it. (Viceroy hadn’t stripped the childish naivete and overconfidence from her in its entirety, apparently.) She thought that she knew what she wanted. She thought that she could fix it – she didn’t think that it would be easy, but she didn’t think that it would be so hard.
She didn’t say anything. She listened. "But I am not that woman anymore. Now, I am no-one and so I have nothing to seek."
She wished that she had an easy response to that admission.
She stepped forward – drew closer to her side. She didn’t know if her presence, much less her proximity, was any comfort; she’d been told that she was a more imposing presence than anything. She did not look at Rhoswen; she stared out towards the haze of light, and she tried to find the right words to say. You aren’t no-one. You’re far from it. There is so much left of you; there is so much you can do. She was loathe to consider anyone a lost cause, but she hesitated too long, – as usual – and Rhoswen was speaking again. "Seraphina, I don't want you to ever forgive me."
Seraphina considered Rhoswen, rolled her words around on the tip of her tongue and contemplated her response. Had she forgiven Rhoswen? (It was a more immediate concern than whether or not Rhoswen wanted her to forgive her.) She didn’t give forgiveness (much like respect) freely, and, really, had Rhoswen done anything to deserve it yet? She’d suffered for her betrayal, certainly, but Seraphina knew as well as anyone (and perhaps better than most) that suffering wasn’t the equivalent of redemption. However, though she’d let a metaphorical fox into a henhouse, she hadn’t directly caused the harm that had come about as a result. There was responsibility there, certainly. She had done something wrong; there had been consequences.
Were the consequences enough to offset the betrayal? She didn’t have an easy answer prepared.
Like most emotions of much depth or consequence, she found herself at a disadvantage; she didn’t – perhaps couldn’t – understand. Her only great love affair was with the sun-swept land she called her home, and the notion of being torn between obligation to her nation and obligation to something else – to family or to love – was impassibly alien. Anyone or anything that hoped to find a place in the silver’s heart, however small, would be forced to confront the knowledge that they would permanently be second. She didn’t know, but, she supposed, she could listen. She could try. “Why?” She decided, finally, her eyes still cast out on the horizon.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have
She had not intended to sound self-pitying. It was a loathsome habit, pitying oneself. As useful as a bow without an arrow, her mother had always said with that lacustrine tone of voice which bore no prisoners within it's murky depths. Rhoswen could not have expected Seraphina to understand the horrors that masticated her thoughts come the ritual of the moon's ever-rising tide; no doubt the silver queen bore more monstrosities within her skin than most - the collar around her throat was a testament to that if nothing else. Sera was close enough now for the red woman to see her own reflection in the gleam of that foreign lariat, close enough to watch the near-stranger staring back at her through distortion: Rhoswen wished only, then, to denounce that red woman. She was unrecognisable, now. They stood close, and for Rhoswen it was the most intimate encounter since the day Raum had left her throat bruised and her heart poisoned.
There was a silence between them; a prelude, a postlude; a beginning, an end.
And then --
"My father was a kind man. He had this way of softening even the sharpest of blades; including my mother's tongue," she could not abandon the brief smile that lived and died on her lips. "When I told him I was leaving for Solterra, he never once tried to stop me. There was no judgement, no penalty for the crime of breaking his heart. His parting counsel, a gift if you will, was a prayer: that his only daughter would never forget the secret of the heart."
Rhoswen paused momentarily, tearing her stagnant gaze away from the mountain to catch the light as it pooled upon the highest planes of Seraphina's face. "He told me that the heart is not all it seems: it is a liar wearing the faces of wisdom and of loyalty to conceal the blackness that lives beneath. For the fairytales we are told as children are falsehoods; warped and dangerous, they try to shield us from the terrible truth. The heart is not a moral compass - far from it, no, the secret is that it is deceitful above all things." There is thunder in the morning mist, it clangs from its home above the peaks of Veneror, but it does, cannot, stop the sun-girl, "It is wicked, Seraphina. It is a predator to devour and consume, stealing everything from us as time ebbs into eternity until we are left only with a wind to howl through our hollow bones. We search high and low for this thief, we spend a lifetime seeking that which butchers our soul until our minds run thin from the madness of it all; for never would we suspect the very author of dreams. The one we trust to guide us home when the last fire dies."
It is almost as though she can hear Iscariot; his words leach the magic from her veins, for she feels quite suddenly a puppet strung up beneath an oaken bough. "You see, I promised him that I would never forget. It was the last thing I ever said to him. He forgave me for leaving, for casting shame upon my family, so long as I kept his prayer in my thoughts until I took my last breath. But you know my story, Sera, you know it better than anyone.
I..."
Her lungs hitch violently, her fire drowning in snake oil and guilt,
She listens to her silently. Patiently. She tries to linger, for a moment, on the red woman’s every word, because she feels like she does not really know the creature in front of her, though she has a feeling that she is opening her heart up for her to see; she tries to piece those little details together into something that resembles a person, because she has never known Rhoswen well, and she certainly does not know her well now. A loving father. A mother with a tongue like a blade. Denocte – she visualizes stars and woodsmoke, the clink of coins, a night sky, the treachery of the Arma mountains. (She knows, in a distant way, that people have grown up differently than Solterran children, choked by sand and heat and raised up to battle the monsters that lurked within their desert home, but she still struggles to visualize it. Perhaps she should go out more, if she has the time.) A heart that lies and lies and lies, a compass that leads you astray; a will-o-wisp, bright and burning, a guiding light that leads you over a cliff to your doom. Seraphina has never been a trusting thing, herself, and she has been quick to realize that loyalty is a fickle thing, at best, but there is something in Rhoswen’s words that sears.
(Perhaps it is because Seraphina still thinks of love as some distant, far-off thing. It is relegated to fairy tales and fables, a mythical and utterly pure concept that she associates with the courtly stories her mother told her as a child, before she had ever even heard of a Zolin or a Viceroy. It is a softer thing, and now, looking at Rhoswen, she is forced to grapple with the horrible truth that sometimes love doesn’t work – sometimes there is not a happy ending.
Sometimes love doesn’t even matter at all.)
And, as she approaches her last words, her voice seems to hitch, as though she is caught in some great tangle – of guilt, or emotion, or memory. Some fatal mixture, she supposes. “I forgot.” Like some fatal condemnation. I forgot. Seraphina lets it hang in the air between them, unsure of what to say. She has never been good at consolation, and she is somehow certain that attempting to console Rhoswen will only make her feel worse anyways; she has made up her mind to punish herself for this, perhaps more than she deserves, and it would be wrong to take the burden of guilt off her. In Solterra, a scar is not such an awful thing to have – a burden is not such an awful thing to bear, so long as you can bear it. The things that hurt, the pricks and bruises and gashes that cut like chasms, are the things that force one to move forward; a content life is a stagnant one.
So, instead, she turns to look at her again, those strange eyes catching in the pale, burning light of dawn. “What will you do now, Rhoswen?” Because that, she hopes, is what really matters. It is not the fall – the fall is inevitable. What matters is standing back up.
(She does not think that Rhoswen will forgive herself. Well, Seraphina knows what it means to do something unforgivable, and she does not think that she will ever forgive herself for the things that she has done wrong, either.)
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have
The dawn, once comforting and clandestine, lay in tatters. Pale colours shot through the woodland, painting murals on the dank earth. Rhoswen felt something shift in the air upon the caseation of her tale, as though the trees had been listening in with ears as old as the gods; she didn't doubt they were eager to hear of a narrative that did not belong to the mountain. Who could blame them? For the only light ever to break their umbral city was that which the mountain allowed through -- their chains mirrored the metallic glint of Seraphina's collar; they were as trapped as the two women stood within their midst.
Rhoswen grew quiet, coveting the silence. Images (some of Sabine, some of Solterra, some of faces she had never seen) rotated on an internal mill, clacking melodiously to the pulse of her dreams. The cyclical nature of life never failed to torment her so; oh, how tired she was of the monotony, of the tedium, of the fucking predictability of Hell. There was no end she could see. Well then, she supposed, she would have to create an end of her own.
“What will you do now, Rhoswen?”
Eyes of desert-smoke turned back to hold Seraphina tight, gripping the sovereign as though she were afraid to let her go. But, one cannot hold on forever; Rhos knew gravity and time always made sure of that. And so with a flare of sadness shooting across her gaze like a comet made of starlight and grief, Rhoswen released Sera from her ocular embrace and offered a subdued smile in its stead. What a pleasure it was to share this moment with the greatest monarch Solterra had ever known. It felt eternal. It felt final.
"I am going to head south; it is time to end what once began."
As the rising sun at last washed away dawn's prismatic kiss, Rhoswen eased forward into it's glare and lifted her head until she was all but blinded by gold. The intensity of Solis' light flooded her veins with passion and fervor; her blood was set alight. It started small: a flicker, a hint of amber, and then in a blink of an eye, her magic ruptured out until the entire top-line of her body was ablaze with fire. In that moment, Rhoswen did not feel small, nor weak. The future was written into her skin like a promise, and it made her strong.
The flames were gone as quickly as they had come, and Rhoswen stepped back into the shadows to face the woman she surely considered a friend. "I hope you find peace with yourself, Sera; you are greater than you know." And with a movement that was as tender as it was brief, the Solterran stretched her muzzle up to brush Seraphina's cheek. The forest claimed her moments after, swallowing her frame whole as she slipped away to chase her fate.
have you ever burned grief but found yourself unable to brush the ashes off your skin?
Oh, her eyes.
When Rhoswen turns to look at her, it is with such a persistent, creeping grief – like vines swallowing up a building – that Seraphina feels her chest constrict. Those stormcloud grey eyes hold her captive, but Seraphina does want to struggle against them; she holds that stare carefully, like it might break in her grasp if she so much as breathes. Her gaze is a rolling ocean, breaking over her back, a tide pulling her under. But there is not just grief within those eyes; there is firm conviction that feels like a promise and both reassures and terrifies her.
And then she looks away.
Seraphina inhales sharply. For a moment, she sees a flare of sadness in those stormy eyes, but it is gone as quickly as it appeared, and she is left with a quiet, subtle smile that Seraphina struggles to return with a ghostly curve of her charcoal lips. "I am going to head south; it is time to end what once began." The words hang in the air between them, almost unbearably heavy, and Seraphina almost asks what she intends to end, but she doesn’t. Rhoswen draws away from her, towards the rising sun, casting her gaze to the horizon.
She can almost mistake those amber sparks for little flickers of dawn, at first. The sun burns behind Rhoswen, casting her pale roan in a darkness that ripples and flickers around the edges; she is staring into the sun, towards their god. Solis, watch over her, she finds herself thinking, to fill the space left behind by a thundering cacophony of questions that won’t make it off her tongue. But then - then - Seraphina sees that amber light drawing a line down the curve of the red woman’s spine, growing higher and higher by the second, more vibrant and more violent - does it hurt, she wants to ask, does it burn you too, but she doesn’t.
For a moment, she is more like the sun than the rising dawn, more glorious and luminous than that great, distant body of fire; for a moment, she is the sun, white-hot and radiant, pulsing with a violence that is as glorious as it is horrifying. She looks warlike – and magnificent – in a way that makes a great shudder of tension run the length of Seraphina’s spine. She tries to hold the image in her mind, to preserve Rhoswen, to burn her burning image into the back of her eyes – this wielder of the sun god’s fire, her friend.
And then the flames are gone, reduced to a smudge of ash. Rhoswen draws back towards her, and she finds those eyes again, for a moment. "I hope you find peace with yourself, Sera; you are greater than you know." Her lips brush her cheek, and, for a moment, Seraphina is suspended. There are words caught up in her mouth, but they won’t pass her lips. She recognizes that those sound like parting words, and she is not ready to say her goodbyes, but she struggles for them anyways; for something poetic or final, or something beautiful, or something that will keep her from slipping into the woods, still smelling of smoke. Rhoswen has disappeared before she so much as opens her mouth, and she is only left with the pale, flickering image of her, surrounded by flames, and a swarm of unsaid words that rustle and buzz in the back of her mouth. “Rhoswen,” Seraphina says, her name like a plea, but her voice is far too late to reach her; she is gone among the trees, like a slip of setting sun.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
![[Image: commission9-by-ameameridian-dchoc51-by-o...chp7gz.png]](https://image.ibb.co/hTA2AA/commission9-by-ameameridian-dchoc51-by-outofthefurnace-dchp7gz.png)
